Tuesday, 9 June 2015

2015 Hurricane Season – The Time To Prepare Is Now!

The 2015 Hurricane Season began on June 1st
and runs through until November 30th. Although forecasters are anticipating a
‘below-normal’ number of storms, they are also telling us “that’s no reason to believe coastal areas will have it easy.”

Be sure to watch the video at the end of this article - extremely scary but true!! Project Phoenix...we MUST be prepared!

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration anticipates that this season will witness the formation of six
to 11 named storms. They’ve set the likelihood for that many storms at 70
percent.

Storms are named when they have winds of 39
mph or higher. Of those six to 11 storms, forecasters anticipate three to six
could become full-blown hurricanes with winds of 74 mph or higher. Up to two
major hurricanes – with winds of 111 mph or higher – could form.

Now – where would be the most likely place for
these major hurricanes to make land fall? Hands down, the experts all agree
that the most likely AND the most vulnerable would be Tampa Bay.

What The??!!

It’s been more than 90 years since the last
major hurricane came onshore in the Tampa Bay area and experts are warning that
complacency may prove costly in lives and property.

According to Massachusetts Institute of
Technology meteorology professor, Kerry Emanuel, “We’ve been kind of lucky… In the Tampa region, an Andrew-sized storm
could cause more than $200 billion in damage, according to a local government
study in 2010.”

Meteorologists say areas like Tampa, Daytona
Beach and Houston should get hit with major storms every 20 to 40 years or so.
The last major storm to strike Tampa hit way back in 1921. Although Hurricane
Frances passed through the area in 2004, it was diminished in strength by the
time it hit the Bay.

Emanuel was quoted by the U.S. News &
World Report, “It’s just the law of
statistics… Luck will run out. It’s a question of when.”

o

o

Even a Category 1 storm would
cause more than $2 billion in damage around Tampa if it were to strike
directly, according to estimates from Hillsborough County, where more than
110,000 structures (most of them residential) sit in an evacuation zone.

Upgraded
building codes that call for shatter-proof windows and hefty wind resistance
mean new construction stands a better chance of holding up in a storm.

"The
things that we are building are going to be more resilient than they have been
in the past," said Bryan Koon, the state's emergency management director.

"Building
codes … have actually reduced the (potential) damages (from a hurricane),"
said Graham Tobin, a geosciences professor at the University of South Florida.

Upgrades,
though, have limited reach, as many structures predate the standards. More than
half of the homes in Pasco were built before the Florida Building Code was
enacted in 1994, according to the county.

Tampa
Bay is also full of mobile homes — more than 100,000 across Pinellas, Pasco,
Hillsborough and Hernando. Even with improved durability (the result of
Hurricane Andrew, which left chewed-up double-wides strewn across South
Florida) such structures are often broken up by cyclones and tossed about like
autumn leaves in the wind. A 2013 state analysis found that there were more
than 850,000 mobile homes in Florida.

Building
stronger, more expensive structures is not always the best way to mitigate
financial loss, according to Watson, who has worked in hazard modeling since
1989 and has advised a panel that seeks to ensure Florida adequately assesses
its risks from hurricane damage. For instance, he said, the destruction of a
modest, older home along the water still costs less than repairing a million-dollar
mansion that is damaged 25 percent.

A
more pragmatic view, he said, would be to assume that "if something is on
the coast, it's going to get knocked down."

AFTER THE WIND COMES THE WATER

After a hurricane, when the wind
dies down, the water begins to rise. In Tampa Bay especially, storm surge poses
a significant threat. If a strong hurricane hit, 20 feet of water could rush
into downtown Tampa, flooding miles of land and pulling splintered homes out to
sea when it receded.

"We
can make things safer from the wind,"
said Harold Wanless, a geology professor at the University of Miami, but "there is so little you can do to make
something safer from the storm surge. The risk is just huge."

Experts are particularly
worried about the potential casualties a major storm in the Bay area would
create.

Christopher Landsea of
the National Hurricane Center in Miami is reported to have said, “My worry is that we’ll have hundreds or
even thousands dead in the next major hurricane that hits the Tampa Bay area.”